Cause sometimes you don't want to search an index. For example, my university uses google, and I can NEVER find what I need. I search for a professor's class site and I just get tons of results from previous quarters, or useless results that just mention the professor's name. a custom search would be much nicer here.

That's what I don't like about weird google search predictions. I don't think the sample is representative, because I think there has to be a common feature of people that use full sentence questions instead of keywords.

Firefox: You can set up a search keyword for any site with a search engine; this lets you search that site directly via the Firefox address bar. To do this, right-click a search field and select "Add a Keyword for this search...". If you give reddit the keyword r, then you can type r penguins in your address bar to search reddit for penguins.

But as we already know, reddit's search sucks. So you can hijack the keyword and make it do a google search instead: do this by going to Bookmarks and finding the keyword you just created, right-clicking and going to Properties, and pasting the above URL into the Location field.

Chrome is a bit different: you don't have to add keywords, as it detects search fields automatically. Typing "reddit" or even "site:reddit.com" in your address bar will prompt you to search within reddit. To make it execute the search via google, right-click the address bar and select "Edit Search Engines...". Click the "reddit.com" result and select Edit, then paste the above URL into the URL field. You can even change the keyword using the Name field.

Final note: you know another site that has a crappy search engine? That's right, Wikipedia. Use the same methods to change the Wikipedia URL to:

Google will likely never be able to offer a site-specific category search. While you can approximate some category searches with inurl:, you can't use Google to perform searches like all posts by a given user in a particular reddit or all posts in a given thread with more than 100 points or top 10 submissions in a particular month. Conversely, there may be very good reasons that Reddit does not want its users to be able to perform such searches.

I could almost agree with this. But what you are really asking is Reddit to build as good of search as Google. I mean does that not sound like a fairly monumental task? Google search has been unrivaled for this long for a reason.

I believe what the general idea here is, is that Redditors don't want Reddit to build as good a search tool as Google, but to have Reddit fix the search function that's been broken for so long. The search on Reddit used to work once upon a time.

If we're talking about when the site was brand spanking new, you may be right. But in my 4 years of lurking/being registered, it has always been a nightmare. I will admit that as bad as it sucks, it is actually better than it was a few years ago. But that's like saying polio is better than spinal meningitis.

I think the problem is there aren't any good open source search engines. My school (Oregon State) uses Nutch, and it's also terrible. If I recall correctly, they actually put a lot of work back into the project and the search results were still terrible. With Google around, there is no real incentive to create a good open source search engine.

Every time someone posts "search sucks", we ask, "What link were you trying to find, and what were the search terms you typed?" and we almost never get a response. Even here, all the comments are "yeah it sucks", "hoo boy it sucks", "reddit, your search is embarrassing!"

If I saw something earlier that day I can just go to the subreddit/front page and find it easily. I'm obviously speaking just for myself here but I usually look for things I first saw months ago hence it should default to "top".

Oh how I wish there was a "previously viewed" searched option.

It should also search synonyms and common words in the comments.

You should also be able to search your comments because even though people write ambiguous titles I can often remember what my comment would have been on the issue.

Also those damn deleted comments, why can't reddit keep the comment and delete the username! It's so hard to get back into a conversation when every other post is deleted. Fair enough if the comment has been reported but if it's just deleted by the author at least keep the comment.

That would be nice. Unfortunately reddit's servers have no way of knowing which links you actually visited. It can only know which links you viewed the comments on. That's why the box on the right side of the page only shows the comment threads which you were looking at.

You should also be able to search your comments because even though people write ambiguous titles I can often remember what my comment would have been on the issue.

Synonyms would be nice. Myself, though, I can usually remember specific words in the link title. Not always, though.

Even that would be okay - Having a previously commented on, kind of thing... Well now that I've said that I realised you may as well just go with my other idea of searching the comments. I tried googling "site:reddit.com/user/heikkikovalainen/ <search>" but to no avail.

You have to specify that it's part of the URL and not part of the site, there is a difference! You should also check that www.reddit.com is in the URL to make sure beta.reddit.com and other duplicate domains are excluded, and check that .mobile is not in the URL to make sure mobile results are excluded.

It won't help much though, because only the first page is allowed to be indexed. I'm using Google as a pseudo site-search and while inconsistent URLs and duplicate results and so on can be worked around, I've found the biggest problem to be up-to-date results. The page you want to search was last read by Google 10 days ago, so nothing recent would be found anyway .

It should be a mix of "new" and "best", just like Reddit itself is. I would expect a word search to, in effect, give me the exact algorithm that reddit already uses for its pages, but minus any entry that doesn't include the search term.

I have a strong dislike for search facilities which require you to enter filter criteria. My personal ethic is that searches ought to primarily give you the biggest picture possible - the pool of stuff you're looking through should be everything. The problem with constraining the pool, is that I end up oftentimes picking the wrong pool. And when I've had several failures, that's very distracting and discouraging.

Furthermore, my mind is in a very delicate place when I'm looking for something. I need to be able to type a word, press a button and get results immediately, because I'm not always sure about the title of the link I saw, and the longer I belabour that, the more likely my mind will get cluttered with doubts and hesitations, which will hamper the search process even more.

You should be able to search within a certain subreddit, or multiple.
You should be able to search for the domain a link was posted to.
You should be able to search within a range of dates... I remember roughly when I saw stuff most of the time.
You should be able to search through comments if you want too (although google can accomplish this).
I think the pagination is fixed now... so that's not an issue. the end.

I used to subscribe via google reader, but some of the more popular reddits have so many submissions. You have to manually go through and find the good stuff. Now I just use reddit when I'm done with my other feeds in reader.

The biggest problem is not the search function, it's that everything is submitted like 800 fucking times, drowning out whatever you were looking for in a sea of quick-kamra-whoring. Implement some sort of redundant submission filtering, and the search function would suddenly become relevant.

I don't find that redundant submissions are the problem. It's that usually the first result is almost always 9 months old. Doesn't it stand to reason that newer, equally relevant articles should appear first?

This is the least helpful thing you could do. If it really sucks - you should add the queries that are "failing" so that reddit can get a better idea of what they are lacking. If one of our QA guys shows up in my office and just says "Your code sucks" - I'd want to punch that person in the face. If they tell me "I found a problem with this this and this" - I'll work with them to make it better. Not that there are any bugs in my code :).

Perhaps, perhaps not. Were you there on the night the Saint Marie went down? I remember standing on the pier, smoking a cigarette, watching the world's largest oceanliner slip into the sea. A man walked up to me.

"And what of the people?", he said.
"Would you like a cigarette?", I said.
"Not tonight", he said. "Too many flames being extinguished to start another"

While we're on the topic of things that suck about reddit, does anyone else think it's a little odd that replying to your own comment causes the big orangered envelope to light up? Many a time I've gotten very excited about the prospect of new replies, but have been shot down. Couldn't they throw in a little IF(YOU) { DON'T LIGHT UP } ?

I should've added that that is exactly what I do almost all of the time ("site:reddit.com etc"), which is what prompted me to mention it. It seems silly to bother with your own engine these days, especially if users are having to resort to the big G anyway.

Speaking from the viewpoint of someone that has been here for a very long time, I'd just like to point out that search is much, much better than it used to be. It actually sort of works now. For the longest time, it didn't work, at all.

I was searching for that chill music thread that was on Reddit yesterday this morning @ work using the keyword chill. The first thing that came up was some r/jailbait picture of a young teen girl... not what I was looking for Reddit.

*edit: Oh, after some quick detective work (google, a proper search engine) I remember you. God damn I was terrible in that video. My "Jesus" shirt really added a sense of "fucking moron" to my whole thing. Good video though. Nice to meet another local here on reddit. I think that brings my total GF-area people to 4. Kind of sad.

Yeah man. I didn't like my part of the video either, so we're even. I had a terrible time with the mount that I put on the front of the bike staying steady. I should have used a lighter camera so that it didn't wobble as much. But I will say that a lot of people watched it and seemed to enjoy it. I wish I'd gotten back to more, but I moved to Albany.

To no avail, I've tried searching for a flash game someone linked to a couple of months ago. It's a word game, there's some sort of mad scientist/inventor and it's on Kongregate (maybe). Anyone remember this?

You know, I haven't had any problems with it in a long time. If I know 1-2 words of the title I get no problems. If for some reason it doesn't come up I just to the subreddit and use the search feature and it searches that subreddit.

Honestly I thought it was fixed. I haven't herd any complaints in a long time.